I'm an engineer myself, so i love this website's name My wife cooked shark meat for our dinner, i can't even share with you how much i appreciated her effort, but the shark meat turned out chewy. She basically seared both sides in medium/med-high heat until it was cooked. What went wrong? Thanks!

I haven't cooked shark meat myself, but using my experience with other fish, I would guess the fish was overcooked. You said your wife seared it until "it was cooked". What do you and your wife consider to be cooked when it comes to fish? In my experience, for most fish, anything over 140°F is way over done while I can't abide some varieties (salmon, arctic char) over 120°F.

I love nearly all kinds of fish, but my experience with having shark meat in a restaurant was that it had a mildly unpleasant texture, grainy and kind of chewy. It may just be a more muscular meat than, say, salmon. Also depends on how the shark meat was cut. A salmon steak is cut across the grain and has a very different texture from a salmon fillet, in which the strands go longways. I remember when sharks meat first came on the market. There may be a reason why it was not commonly found in fish markets. I think it may be just an inferior eating fish, and somebody out to make a buck and a bit cynical may have said "some people will eat anything! Let's see if we can sell 'em shark!" Shark is a fish I would not buy.

Your wife probably didn't do anything wrong....shark just IS chewy if you want to call it that. Usually it's referred to as having a "meatier" texture than most other fish, which a lot of people like (who may not like other "fish"). Swordfish is meatier too. They're not "flaky" fish. (Neither would be "grainy" though.)

Personally I used to eat it all the time, just sauteed with a bit of lemon as I remember (great with mashed potatoes btw, which is a nice complement to that meatier texture).

I guess it's possible that she actually did overcook the shark too, or that it had been frozen badly, etc, before... no way to know, but probably not.